Does the rural white voter strategy make sense for Georgia Democrats in 2018?

Since the 2016 election, there has been a lot of talk about the rural white voters who used to vote for Democrats but were won over by Republicans in recent years. According to the narrative, Republican politicians, particularly those in the same tough-talking vein as Donald Trump, found how to connect with working class white voters in a way that eludes liberals and coastal elites. That narrative may very well be true. There were 206 counties that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then for Trump in 2016. Those counties are whiter, poorer, and less educated (at least at the college level) than the country as a whole. There are five Obama-Obama-Trump counties in Georgia: Baker, Dooly, Peach, Quitman, and Twiggs.

The question now is who those voters are and whether they can make a difference in the Peach State in 2018. It looks there is at least one Georgia Democrat who might believe it. In a recent piece for the Washington Examiner, Salena Zito suggested that State Rep. Stacey Evans (D) could target rural white voters to win the 2018 gubernatorial campaign. Prodded along by former Gov. Roy Barnes (D)—a white Democrat who used a similar strategy to win statewide in 1998—Evans might appeal to low-income white voters who cast votes for Donald Trump and try to convince them that the Democratic Party can do more for them than the GOP.

Evans’ Democratic rival Stacey Abrams doesn’t buy it. She said this to the AJC after learning that Barnes was endorsing the Evans campaign.

There are two theories of this case. One is that we attempt to recreate a coalition that has not really existed since the late ‘90s. And the other is we build a coalition based on the Georgia we have today – a Georgia that is racially diverse, that is economically, uniformly interested in how we move forward….

Abrams has a point here. Democrats won nearly all of Georgia’s statewide races prior to 1992 with strong support from rural whites and urban blacks. But that did not last long into the 2000s, with the GOP eventually taking all of the statewide offices, both chambers of the General Assembly, and a majority of the congressional delegation. Since then, white Democrats have nearly become a thing of the past. One of the Democrats’ best showings was from Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, in 2008. He received 1.8 million votes, which was 47 percent of the state total (Sen. John McCain won the state with 52.2 percent). In contrast, the Democratic gubernatorial nominees in 2010 (Roy Barnes) and 2014 (Jason Carter) received 43 and 45 percent of the statewide vote, respectively. Both were white men running moderate campaigns aimed at swing voters. Both had excellent statewide name ID. Neither came close to winning. So what makes Evans different?

I don’t know the inner-workings of the Evans campaign. It could be that Zito and Abrams have it all wrong and that Evans, if she is so lucky to win the Democratic primary, plans to use a combination of anti-Trump fervor and the GOP’s impending doom in the north Atlanta suburbs to take down whatever nominee emerges from the Republican primary. But if she is pursuing the 1998 Barnes strategy, she will have to woo a coalition that hasn’t shown up for Democrats in nearly 20 years.

If you need convincing that the rural white coalition is not going to be an easy win for Evans, here are some numbers showing how Georgia’s electoral landscape has changed from Barnes in 1998 to Carter in 2014. Barnes defeated Guy Millner (R) in 1998 by a 52.5-44.1 margin. Nathan Deal (R) defeated Carter by a 52.3-44.9 margin in 2014.

Georgia added over 750,000 voters, going from 1.8 million in 1998 to 2.55 million in 2014. During this period, rural Georgia’s share of the vote decreased from 37.1 percent to 32.5 percent. It also went strongly to the Republicans.

In 1998, Democrats won 50.1 percent of the metro Atlanta vote and 55.7 percent of the rural Georgia vote. In 2014, they won 49.5 percent of the metro Atlanta vote and 35.4 percent of the rural Georgia vote.

In 1998, almost 40 percent of Democratic votes came from rural Georgia. In 2014, just 26 percent did.

Democrats won 118 counties in 1998, including 109 of the 133 in rural Georgia. In 2014, they won 34 counties, 22 of which were in rural Georgia. Only two of these 22 counties were less than 40 percent black.

Rural counties swung from the Democrats to the Republicans by an average of 44.7 percent between 1998 and 2014.

I haven’t even shown you Trump’s numbers yet.

Although I could be wrong, my hunch is that Democrats have not figured out how to win votes from white voters in rural Georgia, and it would be folly for them to base their 2018 strategy around it. Instead of trying to recreate the Barnes coalition from 1998, Democrats might fare better by trying to capitalize on recent inroads into Cobb and Gwinnett, both of which voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the northern Atlanta suburbs that almost sent Jon Ossoff to Congress in 2017. With this area’s general discontent about President Trump (which may be amplified in the governor’s race if Brian Kemp or Michael Williams wins the GOP nomination) and expected backlash to Republican policies like campus carry, Democrats are likely to be in much friendlier territory than in the rural areas that abandoned them long ago.

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Rob

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Being from a somewhat rural part of the state, northwest Georgia was solidly Democrat through the ’80s and ’90s. Most of the counties up here flipped from solid Democrat to solid or nearly-solid Republican in the 2000s. The big holdout was Chattooga County, which finally started to elect Republicans on the local level this decade. The usual reason why people voted Democrat but voted Republican in national races was “he’s a southern Democrat…he’s conservative and not like those liberal Democrats in Washington, plus, I know his daddy/brother/sister/cousin/etc…he’s good people”. It’s going to be very difficult, at least in northwest Georgia,… Read more »

1 year ago

Rob

Democrats in 2016 aren’t on the same page as rural voters. There is probably some combination of economic populism and social conservatism (see Steve Bullock/Jon Tester in MT) that could work, but I don’t think Stacey Evans has the answer quite yet. Hell, she could surprise us though. Still, I figure her team is pretty smart and has seen those numbers before. They are probably much more focused on the north Atlanta suburbs, which explains the HOPE-centric message.

1 year ago

David C

Evans is right, and Abrams is wrong. It’s not about actually recreating the 1998 map, it’s cutting down the margins out there. I did the math a while ago (it’s in a post-election post somewhere), breaking down the vote by splitting the state into what the counties the census desecribes as constituting Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state. Clinton did better in the Atlanta Metro than any Democrat running for President since ’92. Given how hopeless Dukakis/Mondale were, and that Carter ’80 lost Atlanta’s suburban counties, she may have done better than any Democrat since Jimmy carried his… Read more »

1 year ago

Rob

Interesting take on it! I agree mostly, but it will tough for Evans to succeed on points 2 and 4. This is a data-free claim, but I think Obama was probably the most successful candidate for those points in the last 20 years. My general thought is that Democrats have been bleeding rural voters in off-presidential years (and probably presidential years as well) since 1998, and I don’t see a whole lot of evidence besides 16 Homes that they’ll be changing their tune any time soon. As to Trump’s unpopularity hurting the GOP in rural areas, I really don’t think… Read more »

1 year ago

David C

I tend to agree on 2 and 4. Obama, and his historic nature made him a special case in turning out those voters despite barely playing in Georgia in 2008 and ignoring the state entirely in 2012. A test for 2020 is if Democrats really target this state and invest in turnout operations they can replicate that. Working on campaigns in Georgia in 08, it was taken as a given that it was a unique opportunity because local Democrats did not have to do anything in messaging or turnout to appeal to or get out the black vote: It was… Read more »

1 year ago

George Chidi

Message matters. Organization matters at least as much. The counties outside of Metro Atlanta have incredibly weak Democratic Party infrastructure. Neither the state party nor the national party gives one damn about changing that. We have county parties that can’t field local candidates, that do not provide vocal opposition to local Republican absurdity, that do not even attempt to raise money, that do not build or maintain grassroots voter connections and advance no theory of governance for people to even consider. The Carter/Nunn campaign, for all the millions spent, left no legacy to build on for whoever wins the nomination… Read more »

1 year ago

rickday

Agreed. The party reorganized on a county level this past winter. So far, we have had a picnic, a rummage sale, a dinner as a small fundraiser for the GA9 Dem candidate, and a march in the July 4th parade. The youngest person that participates is in her 40s, I think.

Sidebar: I deleted my FB account in disgust, as it had algorithmed me into some weird liberal echo bubble and was vampiring my time. I already have reddit for those needs. Will try and stay in contact through here.

1 year ago

Sally Forth

You’re on target, George. Reality is that neither Dem volunteers nor paid staff can go into rural Georgia and, as they say outside 285, “draw flies.” Folks out there don’t want anything to do with today’s Democrats. Georgians outside metro Atlanta gave up on Democrats when the party forgot the point Nathan made above: “The usual reason why people voted Democrat but voted Republican in national races was “he’s a southern Democrat…he’s conservative and not like those liberal Democrats in Washington…” A Georgia Democrat was more like a national-level Republican, had little or nothing in common with national Dems. As… Read more »

1 year ago

augusta52

The Barnes Administration (1999-2003) saw the beginnings of the collapse of the rural Democratic vote. In 2006, when Mark Taylor lost to Sonny Perdue by 20 points, the collapse could be considered complete. The short term problem for Democrats is that if they get walloped again in the “other” Georgia (the roughly 40% of the electorate outside the 29-couny metro Atlanta area), then the only way to prevail statewide is a huge win (maybe 15 points or more) in metro Atlanta. And while metro Atlanta overall is trending Democratic, it isn’t Democratic enough to where a D candidate can write… Read more »

1 year ago

Saltycracker

Rural white voters may be out for Georgia Democrats and their next resistance might be to urban white candidates.